In the original article the author talks of posting a statement of intent in 1994 (13 years after the IPM-PC's debut) and kind of skips over the the next 12 years in a couple of paragraphs, getting to 2006 (25 years after the IBM-PC debut) and FreeDOS V1.0. I was referring to the time FreeDOS was written vs the time MS-DOS was written so I think my 15-20 years range was reasonably accurate.
It did take a while for the PC revolution to really pick up speed. The 1981 genesis involved a floppy only machine. The 1983 PC-XT was the practical workhorse that changed everything. The 1984 PC-AT was insanely expensive originally and the average knowledge worker could well have skipped straight to a 386 machine in the late 80s at which point the dramatic speed increases year on year became the norm for a while. Many people continued using MS-DOS alone into the 90s, I know I did. Windows prior to V3.1 was impractical and nobody used it. Windows 3.1 was a successful product and a good experience if you had a really powerful machine. Windows 95 in, that's right 1995, was the real beginning of the end of MS-DOS alone as a mass market office workers' operating system. I would put the golden years of MS-DOS software targeted primarily at 8088 8/16 bit CPUs (in some ways the 8088 had 8 bit hardware and the comparitively uncommon 8086 was the real 16 bit CPU) as 1983-1988. By 1988 much more powerful 32 bit machines were affordable and becoming ubiquitous, but for a while they were mainly used to run 16 bit software much faster.
By 1994 when FreeDOS got underway, 8088 machines were not worth targeting and I'm not surprised FreeDOS doesn't work as well as MS-DOS on them, as I already stated.
It did take a while for the PC revolution to really pick up speed. The 1981 genesis involved a floppy only machine. The 1983 PC-XT was the practical workhorse that changed everything. The 1984 PC-AT was insanely expensive originally and the average knowledge worker could well have skipped straight to a 386 machine in the late 80s at which point the dramatic speed increases year on year became the norm for a while. Many people continued using MS-DOS alone into the 90s, I know I did. Windows prior to V3.1 was impractical and nobody used it. Windows 3.1 was a successful product and a good experience if you had a really powerful machine. Windows 95 in, that's right 1995, was the real beginning of the end of MS-DOS alone as a mass market office workers' operating system. I would put the golden years of MS-DOS software targeted primarily at 8088 8/16 bit CPUs (in some ways the 8088 had 8 bit hardware and the comparitively uncommon 8086 was the real 16 bit CPU) as 1983-1988. By 1988 much more powerful 32 bit machines were affordable and becoming ubiquitous, but for a while they were mainly used to run 16 bit software much faster.
By 1994 when FreeDOS got underway, 8088 machines were not worth targeting and I'm not surprised FreeDOS doesn't work as well as MS-DOS on them, as I already stated.